Tag: training

You’ll remember at the beginning of September, we adopted Bailey. I keep calling her a 12-month old puppy, though now I think it’s fair to say she’s 13 months. So far, we’ve had many ups and downs with her; training is proving to be quite difficult sometimes. With some other things though, we are seeing a lot of positive progression, and I think it’s fair to say there’s more “ups” than downs.

Bailey playing after being alone all night

I think one of the biggest problems we are having right now is her general re-activeness toward…everything. Particularly when she’s on a leash, Bailey is very aggressive toward other dogs. I did some basic research and the general consensus in most cases is that she feels extra threatened by the other dogs (and sometimes, people) while she’s on a leash, because she’s restrained. So she growls, barks, does whatever she can to keep the other dog away. Since in her mind it works, she keeps doing it.

I found a 3-step guide that I think will work. The trouble is that Bailey seems to have Superman-quality vision, and it’s hard to practice this stuff in a planned manner. She just needs work. Luckily, beyond this 3-step guide, there seem to be plenty of other resources online for leash-reactive behaviour.

Unfortunately there’s not so much information about when your dog gets mad at other cars, inside the car. I think the reason behind it is similar to why she gets mad on the leash; she feels threatened by the oncoming cars, which is then made worse by the fact that she feels restrained being in the vehicle. We wouldn’t care so much, except that she takes to biting at the window and vinyl in the car. Oops.

Our solution to this for now is a restraint that buckles into the seat belt and hooks onto her harness. She can still move around, but ultimately I’d like for her to not get crazy mad at oncoming vehicles. Our priority would be the leash training though – it’s slightly embarrassing when she lunges at other dogs or people and makes us look like we don’t know how to train our dog. That is definitely something I want to avoid.